it appeared to be complaining about the ;

my $conj;
my $query=$Request->Querystring("searchtext");
[download]

returned syntax error near "; my"

anyway I've stripped all versions of perl off, and reinstalled 522, and it's now all working fine.

Well I say fine, but I hit a far more amusing problem. I was building a sql search string and passing it in the querystring to an existing asp script. Unfortunately the "keywords LIKE '%project%'" was, quite sensibly, seeing "%pr" and decoding it. It gave me quite a start when SQL threw back errors full of wingdings :)